There has always been disparity in health care, but that was aggravated when President Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage caps during World War II. Companies who wanted to compete for quality workers could no longer offer more money so they offered "benefits." Like health insurance.
Somehow that health care benefits relic survived after the sugar and meat rationing of the war ended and now rationing of health care itself has become common. A large part of the problem is that corporations get treated differently than individuals when it comes to health care. For individuals, health insurance is not tax-deductible but for companies it is. With the advent of the Affordable Care Act and skyrocketing costs due to an abundance of people forced to pay for a limited supply, corporate health care became more important than ever - and so did rationing for those who had government-funded health care.
Rationing had to be implemented, unless we let foreign osteropaths just show up and be called Doctors there aren't enough physicians, which is why if you are getting subsidized by the Obamacare exchange, your choice of doctors is really limited. Even doctors who deny it is officially happening in their practices recognize the reality of informal rationing. They were still stressed by it. The COVID-19 pandemic took informal rationing to a new level. The medical uncertainty, an incompetent CDC, and the inevitable political spin put on response efforts meant burnout became the new normal for doctors.
People with corporate health insurance now demand their yoga instructors and acupuncture be included in their plan, which will increase costs for everyone, and doctors know mindfulness exercises are about as useful as eating organic food. Yet even they are being told to 'heal themselves' with things they know will not work. "Physicians are sick of being told to heal themselves through yoga and mindfulness when the underlying systems are broken,” wrote Mara Buchbinder, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology at UNC – Chapel Hil and lead author of a paper in Journal of General Internal Medicine noted in late 2022.
It wasn't just the Affordable Care Act that led to stress, the COVID-19 cases were real and even if media and government bureaucrats tried to hide it, the World Health Organisation parroting China and saying it wasn't transmittable from human to human and anyone who said it originated in Wuhan was racist set off alarms that career employees inside CDC and the NIH might have an additional agenda that had little to do with public health. That the same Biden who said vaccines should not be rushed to market by a Republican who only cared about corporations then took credit for the vaccines shortly after winning the campaign seemed strange no matter how you vote.
It's almost like doctors lost trust that government was really trying to help, and six years into mandatory health care the costs had gone up 400 percent and so had the regulations, but care wasn't improving.
That would cause anyone to retire early. Populists will blame insurance companies and claim more government is needed, which means ignoring that government wanted them in the process, and then saddled them with new regulations and told them to pass the costs along.
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